Category Archives: The environment and green belt

Post navigation

During a Council Planning Meeting on 17th December, Powerday once again submitted an application to develop the site of the Old Coal Yard on Tavistock Road in to a waste recycling centre despite it being close to a major area of housing.

A demonstration was arranged earlier today (30th December) by West Drayton ward councillor Jan Sweeting (Lab) where all members of the local community were asked to attend and show our opposition to the scheme. UKIP Hillingdon agree with this stance and were happy to turn up and lend our support to the protest

If the application is successful, we will see Powerday lorries bringing 450,000 tonnes of industrial waste per year in to the heart of our community and further congestion on both Yiewsley and West Drayton High Streets as well as Swan Road.

The news over Christmas has been full of the wet weather conditions wreaking havoc in the North of England and along the Scottish Borders. Whilst the media is full of talk of the cause being down to ‘climate change’ the reality is somewhat different as laid out here by Philip Walling in an article reproduced from The Newcastle Chronicle –

Amid all the devastation and recrimination over the floods in Cumbria hardly anybody mentions one factor that may not be the sole cause, but certainly hasn’t helped.

That is the almost complete cessation of dredging of our rivers since we were required to accept the European Water Framework Directive (EWF) into UK law in 2000.

Yet until then, for all of recorded history, it almost went without saying that a watercourse needed to be big enough to take any water that flowed into it, otherwise it would overflow and inundate the surrounding land and houses.

Every civilisation has known that, except apparently ours. It is just common sense. City authorities and, before them, manors and towns and villages, organised themselves to make sure their watercourses were cleansed, deepened and sometimes embanked to hold whatever water they had to carry away.

As previously reported on this site, the Green Belt at Hayes Park (Home Farm) has been put up for sale on the Rightmove website, with such phrases as ‘Prime development land’ being used in the advertisement.

After an initial public meeting organised by John McDonnell MP that was very well attended and interest from the local Gazette newspaper, residents organised a photo shoot with the newspaper where all were urged to attend and show the strength of feeling against the move.

A number of public spirited locals have distributed window signs and spread the word about the event across the Charville ward and the result was seen this afternoon where a large crowd attended and were backed up by riders from the local stables who use the area to exercise their horses.

Local residents form up just before the Gazette photoshoot

The view from Hayes End Road

Children with their ponies arrive to join the protest

One of the home made banners that was on display

A view across the park

One of the banners made by the children

The crowd starts to disperse after pictures were taken

Any attempts to build on the site will be met with strong protest, as today has shown.

The area surrounding already suffers from flooding during wet spells, which will get worse should the fields be concreted over. Added to the loss of wildlife, increased traffic and degradation of air quality that losing our ‘green lung’ would bring, there are far better places for developers in the area to be looking at in Hayes which has a number of brown field sites available.

In a recent post, I highlighted issues in the Charville ward in Hayes that had been brought to my attention by local residents. These had been relayed to the local councillors to look in to, which elicited the following response from Labour’s John Oswell

Cliff,

I did’nt realise that you lived in Charville ward and that you are a representative there, just who do you represent?, if you look carefully I think you might just find that the ward has three elected Councillors and guess what, you are not one of them.

Can I suggest that you leave Charville matters to elected ward Councillors who actually are all very active on ward issues and that is without any help from you, I might add,

With the sun shining brightly this morning, I decided to show my wife around some of the landmarks in Heathrow Villages

With the ongoing fight against the new runway and the rubbish and pothole issues that are frequently highlighted by our representatives in The Villages, it is good to highlight some of the positive aspects of life in the area and to take some time to look around the sites of historic interest that Heathrow Expansion would blight

The Great Barn, Harmondsworth

Referred to as ‘The Cathedral of Middlesex’, the Barn was constructed in the 16th century and was still a working building up until the late 1970’s.

Restored by English Heritage in conjunction with The Friends of the Great Barn, it was re-opened to the public in April and can now be viewed on the second and fourth Sunday of each month between April and October.

Situated behind the historic St Mary’s Church, my wife and I were treated to a tour by local expert Justine Bayley, who pointed out a number of facts about both the building and it’s reconstruction that highlighted the level of craftsmanship that has enabled the structure to survive for centuries with hopefully many more to come.

Just around the corner from The Great Barn is the relatively recent memorial to the famous inventor Barnes Wallis, who developed the revolutionary ‘bouncing bomb’ that RAF Lancasters of 617 squadron used to destroy the Ruhr dams in 1943. The leader of the raid, Wing Commander Guy Gibson VC, was one of my boyhood heroes so it was good to see the architect of the raid remembered in this way. Barnes Wallis had previously designed the Wellington bomber, the mainstay of RAF Bomber Command in the early years of World War 2 and went on to play a key role in the development of the Tallboy and Grand Slam weapons that were used to sink the battleship Tirpitz and wreck well fortified underground weapons factories in Germany respectively.

The immaculate state of the memorial is a tribute to local resident Armelle Thomas, who was instrumental in its construction and spends time making sure it is always well kept.

Cranford Park

Cranford Park is a haven for wildlife and one of the prettiest walks in Hillingdon. Amongst the numerous plant and insect life, the park is also home to such birds as the Skylark, Meadow Pipit and Nuthatch along with birds of prey such as the Kestrel and Sparrowhawk.

We kept to the pathways whilst visiting in order to not disturb the nests of the Skylarks, which they build on the ground and are very busy at this time of year.

A number of them were noticeable in the air with their distinctive calls, drowned out only by the noise of the Greater Airbus and Boeing that were in evidence on the flightpath in to Heathrow on a regular basis!

Heathrow Villages have been local communities for centuries, with settlements at the ground where the park now sits dating back to The Bronze Age. Seeing the beauty and the history today makes me more convinced than ever that a Third Runway at Heathrow must be stopped to preserve the area for many generations yet to come.

In light of the recent highlighting of a small number of UKIP misdemeanours in the national media over the last week, the following article went up on The Huffington Post from our North East MEP, Jonathan Arnott, earlier today. It lays out far better than I can what UKIP is really about….

I’m one of the 99.7%.

In the media, we hear a lot about the 0.3% – those candidates for Ukip who’ve said or done stupid things, things which neither Ukip nor anyone else in the country would. They’ve had the oxygen of publicity for far too long. I want to talk about the 99.7%, about what we believe.

We’re the champions of democracy, the people who believe that if your MP is involved in a scandal you should, if you have enough support, be able to force a vote to remove them. We’re the people who put that into practice: when Douglas Carswell MP and Mark Reckless MP joined Ukip, both of them immediately put themselves before the voters in their constituencies and asked them to re-elect them. They did. But before Ukip came along, politicians who defected never bothered to consult the people that matter: you. We’re the people who want the public to be able to force politicians to listen through calling a referendum on key issues, to drag democracy kicking and screaming into the 21st Century.